I, Nanobot — Bionanotechnology is Coming

Maria Williams writes "Alan H. Goldstein, inventor of the A-PRIZE, and popular science columnist, says: Scientists are on the verge of breaking the carbon barrier — creating artificial life and changing forever what it means to be human. And we're not ready... Nanofabricated animats may be infinitesimally tiny, but their electrons will be exactly the same size as ours — and their effect on human reality will be as immeasurable as the universe. Like an inverted SETI program, humanity must now look inward, constantly scanning technology space for animats, or their progenitors. The first alien life may not come from the stars, but from ourselves." Yes it's an older article, but it's a fairly quiet sunday today.

Comments

nano-FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Alan H. Goldstein is a crackpot who apparently lacks basic understanding of molecular biology and genetics. For non-biologists out there - this guy is basically saying something like "ALL LINUX USERS ARE DOOMED! A few dropped packets or corrupted bits and Windows viruses and spyware could mutate to infect your computers!"

A nanobiotechnology device that is smart enough to circulate through the body hunting viruses or cancer cells is, by definition, smart enough to exchange information with that human body. This means, under the right conditions, the "device" could evolve beyond its original function. Newsflash... viruses are self-replicating "devices" capable of exchanging information with and modifying host organisms. Under the right conditions (e.g. over the course of the last few billion years), they have been evolving under selective pressure to propagate more readily. Stop trying to portray "nanobots" as bogeymen when pathogens already exist with precisely the same FUD-inducing attributes like "self-replication" and "evolvability".

One solution: Alter synthetic genetic codes such that they are incompatible with natural ones because there is a mismatch in the gene's coding for amino acids." In other words, we will be protected because these organisms will have genomes never before seen on Earth! Perhaps, but that could also be a description of the ultimate biohazard. If the Ebola virus is considered a Biosafety Level 4 threat, what level would categorize a pathogenic organism made completely from synthetic genetic codes? Ultimate biohazard? Nice strawman, dude. Using orthogonal genetic codes in synthetic organisms is exactly the right way to make them safe and restrict them to laboratories. These synthetic genomes will be innocuous for the same reason that bacteriophage are harmless to humans - the manifestation of the genetic codes necessary to make them functional will be fundamentally incompatibile with natural systems.

The carbon barrier will be broken by silicon.

[fyngyrz]

A pretentious, overheated, paranoid dupe, at that. :) But since we're here:

Life will almost certainly arise from Ai (Ai=artificial intelligence), but it won't be "nano" anything. My feeling as an Ai researcher is that we're already well past the computing threshold for Ai/AL (AL=artificial life.) Ai will always equal AL, though the reverse is not implied. A typical desktop today seems to me to have more than enough power to "come to life." What we are missing is the algorithm, no more.

My reasoning for this is as follows:

The complexity of the part of the brain that we use to think is not as high as commonly supposed. Much of what is in there handles what are really (to a computer) mundane things; pattern recognition (sound, light, touch), movement, of which none of which are components of intelligence, per se (ex, a blind, deaf immobile person is still intelligent.) A computer's sensorium can simply be a text stream; and in this realm, pattern recognition, retrieval and communications are relatively natural to it, and extremely high powered in comparison to how we do the same thing. Likewise, a computer has no autonomic system to regulate, no balance to keep, no hungers to assuage. We know very well how to do associative memory, and we know how to make those associations carry associations of their own; I'm talking of the coloration of memory with any set or range of characteristics one might imagine or preconceive into being. This stuff is all relatively easy. Processing it and making sense of it, that's really the issue. We don't have that.

But: Processing isn't likely to be a hard problem. I say this because the human mind (and all the other minds we are aware of) achieve what they do with massive parallelism of very simple structures. Parallel processing is no different than serial processing, in terms of what it can and cannot do in the end. Speed-wise, yes, parallelism is very powerful, but computationally, it is no more effective than going one step at a time and accumulating results. Further, there is no parallel structure that cannot be emulated or represented with serial processing of those structures in a manner that stages results to the appropriate level of parallelism. Processing is, instead, probably an esoteric problem, in that the way it works is not obvious to our higher-level or aggregate way of considering information, memory, and reason.

Some have argued that because of the massive parallelism in the brain, creating something comparable will require a huge amount of resources that we do not yet have. There is a basic misconception at work here, and it is a critical one: If, as they argue, your desktop is not fast enough to compute serially what the brain does in parallel in the same time frame, this in no way undermines the idea that your desktop can still do the computation. In other words, If you ask me a question, and I give you an answer you deem to be intelligent within, say, 10 seconds of reflection; and you type the same question to your presumptive Ai, and it gives you essentially the same answer in say, an hour, that answer is no less intelligent for being more slowly produced. Intelligence isn't about speed - it never has been. Intelligence is about the nature of the question, the nature of the conversation, the nature of the reflection.

The day that someone comes up with an algorithm that produces answers of a nature that we can begin to argue about how well they compare - or exceed - the human capacity, will be the same day that the hardware companies begin to examine the software and build hardware optimized to make those algorithms faster, compile better, etc. Though this will in no way make anything more intelligent, it will make the intelligence easier to converse with for us, right up until the point when the computer is faster than we are. At that point, again, it will be important for us to remember that speed isn't the issue, and never was. Otherwis

Re:The carbon barrier will be broken by silicon.

[stinerman]

So it goes without saying that you believe in strong AI. This supposes that the only difference between a sufficiently advanced "computer" and a human is their hardware. In fact, one would consider a human to simply be a computer with the mind being the programs. One could even reason that artificial intelligences could love, feel pain, etc. This, to me, opens up a very large ethical can of worms. Do AIs now have the right to vote? Can they own property? What are the religious implications? What are the implications for free will?

I am a believer in weak AI until I see evidence to the contrary. In fact, weak AI is why I'm agnostic rather than atheist. We are, at a basic level, made up of atoms which are not self-aware. Our individual cells are also not self-aware. But at some level, we become self-aware and have consciousness. This is the only argument for divine creation that I buy. I would have a very hard time dealing with the fact that the only difference between me and a computer is complexity. My emotions, desires, and dreams are effectively meaningless in that they are manufactured by inborn programming rather than some sort of deeper force. Indeed, if one could discover the nature of consciousness and self-awareness, that would probably be enough to change my opinions.

I would be interested to hear what you have found in your research as well as your unconfirmed beliefs, as well as any moral, ethical, or religious dilemmas you see on the horizon.

Re:The carbon barrier will be broken by silicon.

[fyngyrz]

Specifically, what is your theory of consciousness?

I don't have a formal theory. My opinion is that it is an emergent property with considerable variation that we like to put under one comfortable name, but that which really doesn't fit as well as we would like it to. In other words, no, animals and humans were not all created equal in any sense. :)

How did consciousness develop over time

Slowly, I suspect. Other than that, I have no idea.

d why do we have it and other living (and non-living) things don't?

This is an assumption I am not on-board with. I think cats, dogs and horses, all animals I am very familiar with, are conscious in pretty much the exact way that most humans think of the term. They're not going to produce Einstein, but then again, the best of them routinely outperform lower functioning humans. Most of the objections I've heard, such as the mirror ideas, I have personally seen debunked by animals in the normal course of events. And there are public examples, like the elephant in the news a few weeks back. Even if that were not so, I see no reason that such capabilities are definitive of consciousness, only of arbitrary lines some of us like to draw to make ourselves feel superior.

Is consciousness metaphysical in nature or is it simply about having the right algorithm?

Oh, the latter, no question.

If it is the latter, then doesn't that imply that we are no better than computers this minute, only more complex?

Perhaps it does. So? Why do we have to be better?

at what point do computers get rights?

After congress freezes over? Or are you asking at what point should they get rights? If that is the question, then perhaps a good answer would be when they themselves can explain the answer to you.

Of course, I don't expect you to answer each question individually, I'm just spitballing at this point.

Don't mind a bit. My favorite subject, frankly.

I think if strong AI is true, it would challenge some very fundamental assumptions about life, ethics, and morality.

No doubt. And the more, er, "fundamental" the assumptions are, the harder they will fall.

comment on how close you think we are to true "strong AI" intelligence.

I think we're literally one discovery away, a discovery that is entirely viable within the context of the computers that sit on our desks today; or let me say, that have been near top of the line for the last year or so. A few gigs of ram, a 64 bit CPU, single core or more, a few really big hard drives, the right software. I think once that discovery is made, the rest will happen like an avalanche. And once a reasonable speed, high powered Ai debuts, I think we can look forward to other types of advances. I'm very hopeful about the whole thing right now. The worst thing that could happen would be the discovery be made in a government controlled laboratory. We could very well not see it for some time if that is the case. Paranoid, I know, but there you have it. I'm hoping some wild-eyed GPL-minded type pulls it off and distributes the key ideas worldwide before anyone has a chance to choke the idea down. That'd blow the lid right off, and I'll be happy to watch it blow.

Drivel

[Master of Transhuman]

The fact that he supports Bill Joy and Richard Smalley pretty well defines this idiot.

Smalley is a wannabe who came late to nanotech and decided to use his higher conventional scientific status to try to take over the field from Drexler. He failed, despite this guy's opinion.

Joy is simply incapable of rational reasoning.

And this guy's paranoid fantasies about nanobots "spontaneously impregnating" each other with technology to become an artificial life form - and one that dooms all other life in addition, despite millions of years of evolutionary adaptation on this planet to just about every conceivable hazard - is just drivel.

Sure, nanotech could be designed to destroy all life - but it would have to be DESIGNED to do so. The odds of it happening by chance are so low as to be not worth considering. Sure, badly designed nanotech - and there WILL be badly designed nanotech, we CAN count on that - COULD cause massive medical issues on a par with a deadly virus such as the flu virus in the early 20th century or something like Ebola. So what? You take the risk and you try to prevent it. Nanotech offers many technical options for inhibiting this sort of thing. If the IT industry will get off its ass and develop some AI-based engineering programs that check for stupid engineering mistakes, the entire engineering industry would be better off as well.

What IS going to happen is that Transhumanists will use nanotech to transform themselves into a superior species And that's where the threat is going to come from as monkey-ass humans follow their usual primate instincts to try to suppress the Transhumans - and unlike the Star Trek shows and Terminator movies, the humans will get their asses kicked trying - at least until the Transhumans have improved enough that they can just ignore the chimps and go about their business anyway.